Peeks Fall 2019

FALL 2019 Vol. LVI No. 2 AdirondackPEEKS MAGAZINE OF THE ADIRONDACK FORTY-SIXERS Front Cover: Milky Way at sunrise from Ampersand Mountain. Photo credit: Thomas A. Lizzio #5275W Inside Cover: Heart Lake. Photo credit: Joseph Rector #7648 Contents 2 President’s Report – Siobhán Carney-Nesbitt #5930W 4 Lunch with Laura Waterman - A Keeper of the Flame – Chuck Schwerin #942 with Laura Waterman Foreword to the 2019 Edition of Forest and Crag – Tony Goodwin #211 10 Talking Points: A Conversation with Colin O’Brady 18 From the Archives... On the Laying Down of Stones – Ira Smith #1969 20 Mountain Vignettes An Alaskan Perspective on Finishing the 46 – Jackie Keating #11053 Remembering Grace – Robert “Doc” Browning #1500 Six Peaks, Five Years, and Four Lifelong Friends – Elaine Portalupi #9146 30 Club News Trailhead Steward Program – Fran Shumway #7097 Annual Report of the Treasurer – Phil Corell #224W Trailmasters Report: 2019 – Tom Fine #7138 48th Outdoor Skills Workshop – Bill Lundy #3310 and Don McMullen #224W 40 Letters 41 In Memoriam High Peak Bloom. View from North Colden towards Marcy. Photo credit Manual Palacios, www.Zone3Photo.com FALL 2019 | 3 Lunch with Laura Waterman his past spring I received an email from SUNY Press in Albany, asking Tif I would be interested in receiving a copy of the iconic Forest and Crag: A History of Hiking, Trailblazing, and Adventure in the Northeast Mountains, penned by Laura and Guy Waterman #670W. This new edition, honoring the 30th anniversary of its initial publication, included a fresh foreword by Tony Goodwin #211. Abashed at never having owned a version of any vin- tage, I eagerly agreed. When it arrived I couldn’t help but appreciate not only the prodigious research that went into the generation of the work, but how accessible it was for a reader to pick and choose random chapters to digest, a smorgasbord as delectable as a walk through my local Ithaca Farmer’s Mar- ket. You don’t grow up with a passion for climbing in the Northeast without encountering the Watermans. I had quoted from their book: Backwoods Guy and Laura Waterman at the sugar shed near Ethics in a previous article for PEEKS (“Searching for Wilderness,” Spring the new cord frames. (Barra homestead 4-8-1990) 2017) and knew their reputation as noted rock climbers and mountaineers, environmentalists, authors, and successful homesteaders in the Scott-and- Helen-Nearing mode. I also was familiar with the story of how Guy chose to orchestrate the final chapter of his life. Thanks to a generous email introduction from Goodwin I gave Laura a by Chuck Schwerin #942 call. Was she familiar with PEEKS? Would she consider working with me on an article for the magazine? She recalled early mimeographed versions when Guy first became a member and asked if I would send her a more recent issue. We had, quite literally, walked so many of the same trails and shared similar passions, and though we had never met, I felt I was talking to someone I’d known for years. “If you want to understand my story, I suggest you read my memoir, Losing the Garden,” she said. I did so, stunned 4 | ADIRONDACK PEEKS Lunch A Keeper with of the Flame Laura Waterman by the opening pages that described her last morning with Guy. While the reading answered many questions about their relationship, it raised new ones as well—highly personal. Perhaps too personal for a first meeting that we set up for later in the summer. At noon one day this August I knocked on the door of her cozy cabin in East Corinth, Vermont. “Find it okay?” she asked warmly, eyes sparkling. I was scarcely in the door before she placed in my hand the familiar orange flyer Grace Hudowalski #9 sent to all aspiring 46ers to fill out in anticipation of their registering with the club. Neatly penned were the details of Laura’s 31 climbs, all done with Guy, mostly during winter months in the early 1970s. My first thought was, Could I get Laura up the peaks still remaining? After all, she’s only a spry 79, and still climbing, albeit more sedately. Guy Waterman was well known for his passion for the White Mountains, Guy and Laura Waterman at the sugar shed near the new cord frames. (Barra homestead 4-8-1990) with Laura Waterman FALL 2019 | 5 “A classic, a book that people will read for many years to come.” Bill McKibben $24.00 U.S. Laura Waterman “Suicide is prepared within the heart, as is Losing the Garden L a great work of art.” Albert orestCamus and Crag documents the history of our Northeast In 1971 Laura and Guy Waterman decidedmountains as that history slowly evolved from mountains “It’s pretty rare to read a manuscript and find yourself OS F to give up all the conveniences“daunting of life and terrible” to “mountains sublime” to mountains as thinking — this is a classic, a book that people will read homestead — living on the land, for the land — in a cabin in the mountains of Vermont. for many years to come. It’s not just that Guy Waterman For nearly three decades they“places created a for recreation.” In the introductory note to Part Five in was a fascinating figure, or that he and his wife were deliberate life, eating food they grew them selves, using no running waterthe or electricity. first edition of Forest and Crag (1989), the authors maintain among the most interesting homesteaders of our time. It was an extreme that most of us can only I that true “history,” as opposed to “chronology,” requires being Quite beyond all that, Laura Waterman has written a imagine sustaining for a week or two. universal story about marriage, depression, tenderness, The end of their marriageable came on toa make generalizations that place chronological events in N frigid day, February 6, 2000, when Guy silence. You don’t need to care a fig for mountains or climbed to the summit of Mounta useful Lafayette context. For that reason, the authors explain that Part New England woods to be utterly caught up in this in New Hampshire’s White Mountains and Laura Waterman coauthored many books sat down among the rocks toFive, die. Losing “Mountains as places for recreation: Since 1950,” will quiet, stunning saga.” G with her husband Guy Waterman, includ the Garden is the memoir of a woman who ing Wilderness Ethics, Backwoods Ethics, and Bill McKibben, author of Wandering Home was compelled to ask herself not“How could offer the same degree of generalization as the earlier parts. Forest and Crag. She has published her work I support my husband’s plan to commit in various literary magazines and journals th suicide?” It is an intimate examinationIn support of this reluctance, they quote historian Barbara “Laura and Guy Waterman set the wilderness ethics’ bar including Appalachia and Vermont Magazine. of intricate and dark family histories and She lives in East Corinth, Vermont. high, not just for themselves, but for the rest of us who a marriage that tried to transcendTuchman them. as saying, “The historian fifty or a hundred years e L OSI NG Laura’s father was the preeminent spend time in wild places. Learning that Guy was be Garden scholar of Emily Dickinson, Thomashence H. will put them in a chapter under a general heading we sieged by his own demons does not diminish the power Johnson, whose brilliance washave muddied bynot yet thought of.” of their message to live lightly on the land, but rather it the alcoholism. And Guy Waterman lost two of Garden his sons (one son appears in Jon Krakauer’s gives it depth and humanity.” bestselling book Into the Wild). In LosingLaura the Waterman repeats Tuchman's caution in her preface Mary Margaret Sloan, president, American Hikers Society Garden, Laura Waterman comes to terms with her husband’s long depressionto andthe the second edition, published in 2003, but then states, The Story of a Marriage complex nature of a gifted, humorous man Jacket design by David Bullen who was driven by obsession, selfabsorp Jacket art © CORBIS, by R. D. Sanders, White tion, and a strange lack of confidence. Her Mountain National Forest account of her own marriage, seen as idyllic Author photograph © Carolyn Hanson but riddled from within, is nonetheless a love story, a portrait of an intense and Foreword Shoemaker Hoard unusual marriage, and an affirmation A Division of Avalon Publishing Group, Inc. of life after loss. Distributed by Publishers Group West Shoemaker Hoard, Publishers Visit us at www.shoemakerhoard.com LAURA WATERMAN to the 2019 Edition of but he devoted serious attention to the Forest and Crag Adirondacks too, becoming a winter 46er over the course of just three years, finishing on Marcy By Tony Goodwin #211 in March of 1971. According to Laura, he had set as a goal to climb all the High Peaks in Reprinted with permission winter before ever climbing in another season. Laura’s companions on those hikes included several I knew well, by reputation or with whom I’d hiked. Listed on the Giant Mountain hike, climbed via Bottle Slide, was the name Chuck “Nevertheless, it is hard to resist...not at least to make the Loucks, a renowned mountaineer who, just attempt to understand the changes of the last fifteen years.” a couple of years later, lost his life in a leader So, while keeping the caution about generalizing recent fall on the Jensen Ridge of Symmetry Spire in events in mind, I will introduce this new edition with some the Tetons.

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